AppleOffice Speculation - Page 2

Originally posted by Frank777I've come to the idea that what I want most is for Apple to update AppleWorks to 7.0. But in concert with developing a Cocoa version, they need to silently develop versions for Linux and Windows. And use a common file format for all three.

That way, they have something they can use against MS if they threaten to drop Office.

If that would happen I would crap my pants in happiness.

Ofcourse, this would only happen as long as the file format was compatible with M$ Office for spreadsheet, word, and keynote so that I could still get SOME work done.

Originally posted by Frank777So did Apple cave in to MS pressure to drop Office or is the new suite simply not ready yet?

The Filemaker Developer conference is at the end of August, and everybody's expecting FM 7.0. It'll be interesing to learn whether the box looks like Keynote's.

I've come to the idea that what I want most is for Apple to update AppleWorks to 7.0. But in concert with developing a Cocoa version, they need to silently develop versions for Linux and Windows. And use a common file format for all three.

That way, they have something they can use against MS if they threaten to drop Office.

Straying from fantasia, Kasper is busy digesting pre-chewed morsels of info that suggest the termination of FileMaker 7. According to his entourage of hooligans, the in-house move of subsidiary, FileMaker Inc., was ordered to help transition the software into an iApplication, and database component for the company's upcoming iWorks office suite.

I love the idea of moving the Filemaker team in-house, but the idea the app should be "dumbed down" to iApp status is bizarre. Filemaker's a platform with hundreds of developers, a large and loyal (cross-platform) user base, it's own developers conference and is used by some of the largest companies in the world. "Terminating" it like some under-used Newton division isn't a possibility. Not at all.

A stripped down portion of FM has always been a component of AppleWorks and would be a part of any future upgrade. Moving it in-house is good 'cause the FM guys can share Krispy Kremes with the Keynote guys and others. A new interface could also be a good thing.

But killing such a golden goose is silly, thoughtless and counter-productive.
Jobs has way more sense than that.

Originally posted by BRussellThe TextEdit in Panther can save to Word file format.

That is very interesting.

Very interesting indeed.

It is particularly interesting because (at least in the past), TextEdit was nothing more than an "application-ization" of Apple's (formerly NeXT's) Cocoa (NEXTSTEP) text object. In other words easily available to any and all application developers.

Yeah, I started digging into Apple's current (it is supposed to be getting better with Panther) Cocoa text framework. Wow! It has grown quite a bit since my NEXTSTEP days. It has expanded and improved and appears to be much richer.

I am now absolutely, positively confused as to where Apple's going with office productivity software.

Ooo, talk about thinking differently.

If this means what I think it means, Apple just made it so that every application with access to the text frameworks can save in Word format. Anybody can serve up an alternative to Word now, and people can pick and choose freely between word processors without having to worry about whether they're sacrificing compatibility with the rest of the world. Apple can update that framework and improve everyone's compatibility!

If they add compatibility with the other Office formats, suddenly one of the major stumbling blocks to writing a third-party office app has vanished! It doesn't even have to be a direct competitor to Office, it can be a specialized application that needs to be able to interoperate with Office.

Pure genius. Pure frickin' genius. This is the sort of thing that reaffirms my faith in Apple.

Originally posted by AmorphIf this means what I think it means, Apple just made it so that every application with access to the text frameworks can save in Word format. Anybody can serve up an alternative to Word now, and people can pick and choose freely between word processors without having to worry about whether they're sacrificing compatibility with the rest of the world. Apple can update that framework and improve everyone's compatibility!

I hate to say I told you so...

I thought XML was just a syntax, not a file format. That's why MS can use it and not worry about losing their stranglehold on productivity software. Their exact XML "language" is still proprietary. Is rtf incapable of handling more complex graphics? What is Keynote's file format? Isn't it a bundle of some sort? To me, as long as the ability to quickly and painlessless move data into these compatible formats is met, Apple might be best suited to use what's best for their apps. The bundle concept is great for apps like Create, Keynote, etc. On the other hand, since PDF is essentially postscript with some special headers, could Apple just add their own headers and info to the file and keep most of the PDF format (so long as they don't call it a "special" PDF format and clearly differentiate it to users)?

Apple should come out with an killer office suite that can read and save MS Office file formats and other open source formats. They should make it for Windows and the Mac and give it away free.

Why would anybody pay for another copy or upgrade of Office? MS would lose its cash cow fast. Gates would have a heart attack.

This is a play right out of Gates book. Remember what IE did to Netscape? What is MS going to do - sue Apple for being a monopoly?

Apple better make sure their office suite is ready for prime time though. Don't let the cat out of the bag to early.

Think different(ly). Think outside the box. iTunes for Windows? How about iOffice for Windows?

If Apple goes on the attack and does this, what would MS do? Sell more Xboxes?

Just imagine you work for a office or school with 1000 computers. Are you going to pay $150 to upgrade to another version of Word? That's $150,000 verses Apple's iOffice for free. Try convincing the school board or the boss that MS Office is worth $150,000 more.

Anytime one company makes the only major program for some segment of the Mac, Apple can be held hostage. Even if there is competition, if one program becomes overwhelmingly dominant, Apple can be held hostage. As far as I'm concerned, let Apple develop Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Quark, etc. equivalent software.

MS has its hands tied with Monopoly issues, Apple doesn't. Apple can do the operating system and all the software and MS can't. Apple can not only survive, they can win.

(Apple also needs multiple CPU vendors. The new G5 from IBM may be super cool, but if IBM were to ever drop the ball, let's not have another Moto. I say put OS X on Intel and AMD. No clones, just Macs with alternate CPUs.)

Apple is now into the server market. If they can beat MS with office and undercut them on the server front, what is left for MS? Windows and Xbox. The Xbox is not helping MS. That leaves Windows.

Apple could always announce their OS for PC and bundle all their software with the OS for PCs. Checkmate. MS either goes out of business or innovates like hell.

Remember David did kill Goliath. It can happen again. iOffice, or whatever it's called can be the first big bomb on MS. Gates gets caught with his pants down.

This is very interesting, and it seems that there's almost no question now that Apple is assembling the pieces of an iOffice/Office-pro of thier own. Does anyone remember the StarOffice talk of well over a year ago? Something was/is up.

The problem, as with Safari, is "standards"

I remember when M$ was intentionally breaking file format compatibility betwen versions of Word, various shenanigans continued in each new verion of the .doc format untill Office97, iThink. Bastards. But what they've ended up with is a defacto standard now. Does this put pause to M$ own ability to break and redirect standards as they please, since we've had a generation or two of relative intra-Office file format stability, or can M$ sense the encroaching perfection of "standards" interoperability from competitors (like Apple, Sun, Open Office) and make seemingly arbitrary changes to protect their cash cow Office business. Business may back-lash, but where do corporations with hundreds upon hundreds and thousands of seats turn?

I think for Apple's sake, they need a team that is dedicated on working out the inevitable semi standards M$ launches in the face of true compatibility, but not actually be slaved into working in those standards, and rather work natively in some "open" format while working real hard to have the suite translate as perfectly as possible into and out of the format. For text, RTF and PDF sound like the winners. For Excel and Access? iDunno. I hate having to use Access for databases, but what to do, I don't make the things, I just enter some info from time to time, still it's one of those things that makes working with a mac a bit of a pain.

Originally posted by MatsuThis is very interesting, and it seems that there's almost no question now that Apple is assembling the pieces of an iOffice/Office-pro of thier own. Does anyone remember the StarOffice talk of well over a year ago? Something was/is up.

The problem, as with Safari, is "standards"

I remember when M$ was intentionally breaking file format compatibility betwen versions of Word, various shenanigans continued in each new verion of the .doc format untill Office97, iThink. Bastards. But what they've ended up with is a defacto standard now. Does this put pause to M$ own ability to break and redirect standards as they please, since we've had a generation or two of relative intra-Office file format stability, or can M$ sense the encroaching perfection of "standards" interoperability from competitors (like Apple, Sun, Open Office) and make seemingly arbitrary changes to protect their cash cow Office business. Business may back-lash, but where do corporations with hundreds upon hundreds and thousands of seats turn?

Well, see, once the cat's out of the bag, and there are alternatives to Office, they can turn somewhere else. All their existing documents will be compatible with the alternatives; Office will become the incompatible one! That's the goal, anyway. It might be a while getting there. A distressing number of people think that Word is the only word processor in existence.

Apple will have to make this an ongoing project, just as Samba has done with Windows networking. In fact, if Apple really wanted to be subversive, they would open source their Office file compatibility code so that everyone could get in on the game. Numbers matter here; if enough companies and government agencies move to Office alternatives and depend on the compatibility, then MS can't change the format as easily, or at all, without making their own app look less attractive. The format change as upgrade incentive tactic only works when you have a lock on the format.

In fact, do we know that Apple hasn't borrowed an open source effort in the first place? This could be something they've borrowed, and will contribute back to. I have a feeling they'll tell us when they unveil Panther.

I agree that it should remain a compatibility option, and that other applications should adopt standard, non-obfuscated formats based on XML or SGML or TeX or PDF or what-have-you. The point is to eliminate the great, lethal "but" at the end of every alternative word processor review that I've read, which is the lack of compatibility with Word.

AS good as Safari is for a 1.0, it still doesn't interact properly with a ton of pages that just work in IE/Windows, especially drop down tabs/menus embedded in the page. Even if M4 does things half assed, those become the standard that web designers use. And you can't really blame them for saying "fvck it" i fit works with the mac cool, but if it doesn't, I'm not losing sleep.

Office is a differnet situation, yet the 900 tonne Oliphant marching to Mordor still commands respect. If M$ had any integrity and/or confidence in their product, they'd deliver office vis a web browser, the same Office to *any* platform with the appropriate browser.

Apple seems to have a bit of a swagger of late. Slapping their "OFFICE" into a browser and GIVING it away migth be a cool way to ensure APPLE OFFICE files open right in M$ OFFICE. Of course the full version of Apple Office woudl only run on Macs, but they put a little tether out there to help get people using REAL standards, and not defacto standards.

Nisus is years late in getting Writer to market. But the screenshots look very good. (But the icons look weird.) Could Apple buy Nisus, fix the icons and have a mature WP app to market?

Mariner's Write and Calc, are now OS X native but no major upgrades are known to be in the works (such as tie-ins to Keynote, Filemaker or Address Book/Mail) Can't say I blame them. What's the incentive? Who knows if Apple's going to compete with them tommorrow?

OpenOffice won't be a player on the platform till Spring 2004 at the earliest. X11 is good for the geek set, but Aqua is a requirement for mainstream adoption.

And all the while, those guys from Gobe must be working on something....

I haven't dug too deep into the technical possibilities MS Office offers lately. But instead of making a possible Apple Office Suite compatible to Microsoft's, they could make MS's compatible to open standards (or their own format) by developing filters for MS Office.

In the new "IBM friendly" world, perhaps Apple could consider licensing/jointly developing Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus WordPro for OS X.

It strikes me that the spreadsheet app is probably the most difficult to get right (compatibility for 100's of functions, iteration, charts, database functionality etc etc etc). Lotus 123 is probably the second best spreadsheet out there (Excel even offers compatible keyboard shortcuts) - if Apple are serious about achieving a high degree of compatibility, 1-2-3 would make a useful starting point.

Originally posted by McCrabIt strikes me that the spreadsheet app is probably the most difficult to get right (compatibility for 100's of functions, iteration, charts, database functionality etc etc etc).

Okay, I am talking out of my @ss here but I would think that Excel would be easier to get write than either Word or PowerPoint. The reason is that no one actually cares that your spreadsheet looks exactly the same as someone elses as long as they work the same. The problem with translating Word documents is that one pixel different here and there and you get line breaks in different places and soon your tables are unreadable and your page breaks are all messed up. With Excel, sure you have to impliment a lot of functions but really all you have to do is make sure that the functions work. No one cares if text in your left justified cells is one pixel to the right of the cell boundry while in Excel it is two pixels.

Originally posted by JBLOkay, I am talking out of my @ss here but I would think that Excel would be easier to get write than either Word or PowerPoint. The reason is that no one actually cares that your spreadsheet looks exactly the same as someone elses as long as they work the same. The problem with translating Word documents is that one pixel different here and there and you get line breaks in different places and soon your tables are unreadable and your page breaks are all messed up. With Excel, sure you have to impliment a lot of functions but really all you have to do is make sure that the functions work. No one cares if text in your left justified cells is one pixel to the right of the cell boundry while in Excel it is two pixels.

I tend to agree with this. I think a spreadsheet (at least the core engine) would be amazing easy to do. The UI a bit more difficult, but Apple is already part way there with some of the classes in their Cocoa framework.

Additionally the functions you speak of are all very well known (and not terribly complex) formulas.

Agree with you on math, finance, date, text functions etc where once the basic calc engine is put together, adding additional functionality (or for that matter, add-ins) should be straightforward (also, most spreadsheet functions are easily discernable - most can be figured out using first principles). The main issue I have found is in relation to iteration/resolving circular references (where as far as I am aware, there is no spreadsheet in OS X that deals with this [other than M$ Excel]).

Also, I use Excel to create finished product/output (charts and tables) that are simply copy/pasted into a Word/PP document based on scenario analysis run out of Excel - in this case formatting becomes quite important. Excel does this reasonably well.

I agree that word and PP are not easy to get right - but still believe excel is not exactly a walk in the park either. Damn MS.

Earlier post talks about 'NeXTstep days' and the thought about Apple building an integrated office suite made me think about the cool subscribe and publish technology in NeXTstep that has not yet re-surfaced in MacosX yet... Textedit was one app that it worked in and basically you could subscribe to an object (e.g. from Draw.app) and it would not only update locally on your machine if the object changed but also OVER A NETWORK. Imagine if someone receives a Keynote presentation and you can change the sales figures in your local spreadsheet and these are live fed into a presentation of someone giving a Keynote presentation with a PB with airport at another location. This is what Avie is working on, right... And a lot of this was already developed. Pretty please Apple ...

It would seem that Apple/Filemaker would move Filemaker to being more compatible with SQL databases and enterprise solutions. One of it's weaknesses is the poor fit with coldfusion or java solutions used in business.

Hrm. Sounds to me like Apple is going to develop an office suite more like Office, and less like Works. Which means seperate apps, designed to work together. My predictions? (And remember, these are completely unfounded, based on wild rumors, and not to be trusted... unless they're right. )

Spreadsheet - Hey, the name's been used before. Again, rip the spreadsheet function out of AppleWorks, give it Excel .XLS read/write.

Keynote - Bundled in with the suite for presentations. Already has Powerpoint import/export abilities.

File - Essentially, Filemaker 7. Most likely fully-featured, with the exception of an inability to serve databases over the network. The killer would be if they could add an Access database import/export function. I'd expect "File Pro" would be a seperate product similar to Filemaker Developer / Unlimited, offering more functionality, including serving databases and creating stand-alone programs, at a much higher price.

Final price for the suite? $299, with each piece available individually for $99 (just like Keynote is priced now). That gives them a competitive price with Office, while allowing people on a budget to pick & choose the parts they want.

It's using Java, so it's unfortunately a bit slow on older Macs. But for the first version (0.0) it's quite good. It does not yet have printing support, no drag and drop and the clipboard is NeoOffice-internal, but it has no problems with fonts and uses all installed fonts. It reads Word files. As soon as the three missing features have been added, it will be a great free Office alternative. It's not true that OpenOffice for the Mac doesn't make progress. It certainly does. And the timeline is not at all "way off schedule".

A stable native Aqua version of KOffice that will also read Word files is due in 2-4 months.

However, I think Apple should not use one of these Office suites. Compare Keynote to any other available presentation software. Keynote looks gorgeous, because it uses all those specific Mac OS X technologies like Quartz, ATSUI etc. KOffice and OpenOffice would not use them. KOffice and OpenOffice will be nice (and free), but why should a user who already owns Word switch? They do nothing Word cannot do (one exception: they support Unicode on the Mac, Word supports Unicode only in Windows). A new Cocoa AppleWorks/iOffice should really offer additional functionality, just like Keynote includes transitions, great graphics support and typesetting capabilities unmatched by PowerPoint.

In other news, Nisus Writer Express 1.0 has been released, but (currently) lacks many important features, e.g. footnotes or tables. It's $60.
A new version of Mellel with much better RTF support (will import/export footnotes, tables etc.) will be out in August. Mellel costs $25, including 3 years of free updates. Soon Mellel will also support outlining.
Papyrus X! for Mac has also been released recently. It supports Unicode, Word/WordPerfect/RTF import, footnotes, tables (including complete spreadsheets), outlining, automatic generation of index and table of contents, forms etc. It includes basic DTP functionality, too. Papyrus is very fast and suitable for very large documents (has been tested without problems with documents having more than 30,000 pages). It's $99 but unfortunately the English version is not out yet - interface and manuals are German-only at the moment.

Originally posted by rivendellApple should come out with an killer office suite that can read and save MS Office file formats and other open source formats. They should make it for Windows and the Mac and give it away free.

Free? No way. But Office costs $400-800, so if they took OpenOffice, changed it, and announced "iSuite, for Mac and Windows, just $179" - poof, MS will have to eithier lower their price drastically or lose much of MS Office's market.

Originally posted by ryaxnbFree? No way. But Office costs $400-800, so if they took OpenOffice, changed it, and announced "iSuite, for Mac and Windows, just $179" - poof, MS will have to eithier lower their price drastically or lose much of MS Office's market.

They should at least include the word processor portion of it on every Mac, for free. This way people aren't stuck using TextEdit until they find $179 for iOffice.

By dropping the price of the suite $100USD, the upcoming competition from OpenOffice in 2004 may be squarely in their minds.

The $149USD Student and Teacher edition is a direct assault on AppleWorks, so now Cupertino really either has to decide: Stand and Fight or Turn and Run...

AppleWorks 6 is a dreadful app that must either be upgraded or put out of its misery. Filemaker is still MIA with 8 days to go before the Developers convention. Mail and TextEdit are upgraded in Panther.

But a Spreadsheet solution is still non-existent (Unless it's been incorporated into a new Filemaker. Is that even possible?)

I know I'm obsessing about this, but right now we're on a platform that has best-of-breed music collection, advanced movie making abilities and now world-class video-conferencing.

But we're stumped when Grandma wants to know what Apple solution she should use to type a letter.